Big data vendors score with Twitter crowd: Ovum

Twitter proved beneficial for market acceptance of big data and the vendors who provide the service in 2012 according to new research from analyst firm Ovum.

In a report called Big Data: what's hot, what's not according to the Twitter stream the analyst firm examined data gathered by DataSift which ranked Twitter mentions and sentiment for big data vendors and open source organisations last year.

While Hadoop grabbed most of the attention as a big data platform, the vendor 10gen, which developed MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project.

IBM and Teradata scored third and fourth places in terms of Twitter stream mentions, trailing only behind Apache and 10gen in positive mentions. In addition, Splunk, which is associated with machine data, also scored highly according to the Ovum research.

However, negative sentiment spiked in November 2012 with headlines over HP's troubled acquisition of US enterprise search company Autonomy.

HP disclosed an US$8.8 billion write-down in November, around $5 billion of which was attributed to accounting improprieties by Autonomy. The write-down was for impairment of goodwill, a term covering intangible assets such as the value of a brand and good customer relations.

Ovum US principal analyst Tony Baer said he was surprised that online sentiment expressed about big data vendors remained positive in 2012 despite the build-up and "suggested hype".

"While Twitter streams are not a scientific focus group for detecting brand awareness, they provide a valuable window on market thinking," he said in a statement.

"The data showed that while some players, such as IBM and Teradata, successfully scored high recognition in Twitter mentions, other enterprise players need to better focus their message to get big data recognition."

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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